Min/Max Boards

Quote from: Sinfire Titan on March 30, 2012, 02:00:37 AM

Quote from: SneeR on March 30, 2012, 01:41:46 AM

Your Stormfront Fallacy addresses a nonissue. I have never heard of someone taking penalties based on race in a game of D&D.

I find it very hard to believe that you have never read the rules for races in 3.5.

I meant penalties applied by the DM which defy RAW, like a penalty to ranged attacks for dwarves, which seems to be what the OP is addressing.
I'll edit that in for clarity, though.

Who said anything about defying RAW? I point out racism codified into the rules, and you say it doesn't count because it's codified into the rules? What kind of sense does that make?

Let me give you more concrete example.

Suppose I give males a massive bonus to strength. This effectively penalizes everyone who wishes to play a female character.

If we look at any sort of male vs. strength data, men are overwhelmingly stronger. But is this a justification for giving all males characters a strength bonus?

Only if you don't understand statistics. Every individual female is precisely as strong as she is. The fact that other females are weaker doesn't personally affect her. Statistics only allows you to say things about populations, not individuals.

Is there anyone here who would be comfortable telling a player that their (female) character is going to be weaker than the male characters because she's female?

Of course not. We realize in this instance that PCs are exceptional individuals. Exceptional individuals, by definition, deviate from population norms.

If a wish to play the strongest halfling ever, why should I have a penalty to strength? Because halflings, on average, are weaker? I'm not playing *all* halflings. I'm playing ONE halfling.

Stormfront fallacy.

We're all familiar with this:

The Stormwind Fallacy, aka the Roleplayer vs Rollplayer Fallacy
Just because one optimizes his characters mechanically does not mean that they cannot also roleplay, and vice versa.

Corollary: Doing one in a game does not preclude, nor infringe upon, the ability to do the other in the same game.

Generalization 1: One is not automatically a worse roleplayer if he optimizes, and vice versa.
Generalization 2: A non-optimized character is not automatically roleplayed better than an optimized one, and vice versa.

... which basically says that optimization does not preclude roleplaying.

It's commonly used as a defense by character-optimizers when confronted with accusations that they are not playing a role.

But it occurs to me that there is a corollary to this: the notion that characters whose identities are chosen for narrative rather than mechanical reasons either suck, or should be allowed by the system to suck.

I propose the Windstorm Principle:

An RPG system where a character concept inhibits optimization is failed system.

In other words, if I must be an aquatic dragonwrought kobold rather than a dwarf in order not to suck, if I must play a spellcaster instead of a skillmonkey to remain relevant, then what I am playing is not so much a sandbox as a cage, and RPG rules are not so much a simulation as a form of BDSM.

Also propose the Stormfront Fallacy:

The notion that because a race is generally worse at X, all members of that race are worse at X, and this should be reflected in RPG rules.

(Named after the racist website, "Stormfront".)

In other words, just because dwarves are generally not skilled archers is no reason to impose mechanical penalties on a player who thinks it would be fun to play The Dwarf Who Never Misses.



Discuss.

GURPS is a good system, but it has a few major flaws.

First is lethality. This can be fixed somewhat by playing 150 pt characters, and playing some scenario where healing magic or high-tech medicine is available.

Second is scaling. 100 pt fighters own 100 pt mages. 200 pt mages are floating death fortresses that annihilate any number of 200 pt fighters. Play 150 pt characters.

Third is active defenses. They don't scale to the attacker's skill. This breaks the game at both high and low point levels. 

One factor that you all are either forgetting or not mentioning is the way that offensive capabilities effect the number of SoDs or other IP-relevant effects one gets hit with. The better your offense, the fewer IP-relevant effects one will face in each encounter. There is a tradeoff between the utility of beefing defenses, and the utility of resources to finish combat quickly.

That's right, creativity exercise time.

Come up with a new idea for a campaign or whole setting, and describe it in ten words or less.

Anything posted is fair game for borrowing!

Many people are uncomfortable with their taxes being spent on programs they despise, such as birth control or the military.

But taxes are a necessary evil.  The allocation of funds and resources towards vital programs is such a convoluted and complicated procedure that only a few people can really understand it, and managing these resources is a full-time job.  If all government programs were voluntary, then people would give money based upon what they decide is important or on programs that they approve.  And many people would not pay taxes at all!

What you refer to is called the tragedy of the commons.

However, no one is claiming that all taxes are evil and unnecessary. I pointed out that taxes are coercive, and therefore only appropriate when coercion is appropriate, which it sometimes is.

Charity with one's own money is good. Charity with someone else's money, taken by coercion, isn't.

I would say that one of the bigger differences is that killing is usually a means to an end whereas rape is usually an end in and of itself. Thus it is in a way "given the spotlight" very unlike normal violence...

This I can agree with. I tend to handle sex of any kind (not just rape) in my games with "the three-asterisk pause" (as novelists would call it), mostly because sex just isn't that interesting except to someone who is actually participating in it.

If it is just mentioned that someone is raped int eh same context as some mook or innocent was killed then fine its a relatively realistic part of the game that can be accepted and understood. If the rape is happening to a PC well they will likely want to fight back in some way. Thus it needs to be handled with great care in the same way that mind control, torture, and other things that abridge a PC's freedom need to. There are no bad story ideas, only horribly flawed executions.

Agree again.

I find myself reiterating my puzzlement at the notion that rape is an exception to the ordinary social mores that govern how we handle bad things happening in RPGs.

Characters can, on occasion, get shot, blown up, stabbed, set on fire, eaten alive, diced, enslaved by illithids, turned inside out, etc. Players are expected to deal with these with a modicum of maturity, so long as they are consequences of failure, and not something that they are simply railroaded into.

Now, I agree there's a problem with GMs that get some sort of thrill by *making* rape happen in their games. In the same way that there is a problem with GMs who love inescapable death traps, or describing your character's death to you in great detail. The GM's proper job is to create a gameworld that is challenging, has verisimilitude, and is engaging, rather than telling an immutable story that gives *him* vicarious thrills.

But I morally uncomfortable with the notion of denying a PC's agency. (Agency: the quality of being able to make choices, and take risks, and being responsible for the outcome thereof.)

I am reminded of another major villain I once set PCs up against... Cassandra of the Axe, a pirate queen who hated men, and was in the habit of having any that she captured castrated and then released. Now, it so happened that they managed to take her down without any PCs being captured, but had this happened, and had they failed to escape in a timely fashion... well, hope you can cast Regenerate.

For the risks the PCs take to be meaningful, and the game world realistic, negative consequences must exist, and they must be roughly what they would be in sort of world you are creating. Now, because it's game, and not a novel, the players are allowed to act in any way that they realistically can, and can think of, to avoid such fates. However, there is no special "PC stamp" on the foreheads of characters that automagically exempts them from the things that are happening to NPCs around them. 

Now, let us examine the case of a female PC who encounters a ship full of Vikings on a raiding expedition. This person has options. Fight and win. Flee. Bargain. Fight to the death rather than be taken. Hide. Bargain. But fail to do any of those, and I am not going to suddenly turn the game into a Neill Gaiman story, where all the Vikings are gay, or a Disney movie, where everyone just sings a song about having a dream.

Quote from: Whisper on January 26, 2012, 04:29:19 AM

Quote from: Libertad on January 18, 2012, 12:10:07 AM

"I'm tired of people treating sex like it's icky!  There's nothing wrong with introducing erotic elements into D&D!"

Sounds perfectly reasonable...

Quote

His first night of gaming: "I wildshape into a panther and rape the prostitute!"

Gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii... what the actual fuck?

Its whats wrong with introducing erotic elements into a game. Some people suddenly metamorphose into terrible people who would shove their fetishes into your face at every opportunity.

I call that a people problem, not a game-elements problem.

I find it kinda weird that people in this culture are so attuned to violence that they can emotionally detach from the in-game slaughter of thousands or millions, but when something sexual happens... heads asplode.

I tend to have these elements in games I run when they would normally occur. I've twice had female PCs, played by females, raped by NPCs, because they were in a situation where... well, that's what would happen. No way around it.

One of them was handled with particular adroitness by the player in question. Situation was, whole party and their airship was captured by a crew of sky-vikings, who were especially pissed to find that their sailing crew was made of animated skeletons (Vikings hate necromancy.)

The character in question had put a lot of points into physical attractiveness. (It was a points-buy type RPG).

So I took her aside and said: "You know what's probably gonna happen, here, right?"

She nodded with a slight wince. Then had an idea. "I'm gonna to pick out the biggest, baddest Viking of the lot and start making eyes at him.", she said.

I saw where she was going with this. One successful vamping-skill role later, several other Vikings are nursing broken noses and she's in his cabin.

I glossed over it with "Your evening isn't precisely ideal, but it's a lot less rambunctious, and less crowded, than it would have been otherwise. I'm awarding you X bonus experience for quick thinking. Now, does anyone else wanna do anything before the next day?"

In D&D, warriors to the majority of their deathdealing on their own turns. Which I suppose makes sense from a game mechanics point of view. But, given the existence of attacks of opportunity and what they're meant to represent, why then, are a warrior's attacks far less effective when they are taking advantage of their enemies' foolish moves and/or missteps?

For example, a Barbarian leap attack pounces on a guy, charging and attacking him four times, dealing 2d6+30 damage with each hit. Then, the victim pulls out and drinks a potion, provoking an attack of opportunity from the Barbarian which deals 2d6+20 damage if it hits. Now, in real life, pulling out a potion and drinking it in combat with and in front of a guy with a greatsword will get you killed. But in D&D it results in somewhere roughly between 1/4 and 1/5 the Barbarian's normal damage output.

Okay, hold on a moment, there, Slim.

Your barbarian gets that damage output by making multiple attacks. Now, if his opponent must divide his attention, this gives him an opportunity to make *another* attack. And you're somehow construing this as "less" damage?

I've been thinking about this concept ever since I watched Sucker Punch a couple weeks ago, and it just doesn't seem right. In the movie, Baby Doll straight up kills an adult dragon in one attack of opportunity that she got because the dragon made a battlefield misstep. It seems to me that AoOs should be more deadly than regular attacks, because, nearly by definition, they have messed up in a way that opens up their defenses.

Wait, so you're reality checking this based on one of the most unrealistic films in the history of filmmaking?

If we want to reality check things, we have to think in terms of realities, not film. So what does an attack of opportunity really represent? When might one get an opportunity to make *more* attacks?

Is it, as you say, when an opponent makes a tactical misstep? No, it isn't. Compromised defenses do not allow for *more* attacks, they allow for *more successful* attacks. I do not suddenly become faster when my opponent stumbles, or is distracted.

So what does allow for more attacks? Well, anyone who has trained for actual hand-to-hand combat knows this: the reduction of a deterrent threat. In other words, I can attack more when I no longer have to watch out for my opponent's counters. In practice or in the ring, ceasing to threaten a counter attack can swiftly draw a flurry of strikes.